Thursday, March 10, 2011

PHILIP'S STRANGER THAN FICTION

I can find no info on Philip Stranger, but I can tell you that he is a veritable one-man weird-music cottage industry, if so much music in so many styles can be made by just one man. He covers all the bases: Residents-like quirky pop, Phillip Glass-y piano minimalism, found objects percussion, sampling/concrete musics, exotica, noise, electronics ranging from Space Age to punk intensity, and unclassifiable oddities.

He has a tremendous amount of free music up, but here's some highlights I've discovered (recommended tracks in parentheses):

Lettuce: the psych side of 60s/70s Moog intros("A Meal To Induce Sleep")Trilogies of the Toilet: "...recorded in a movie theater restroom (great acoustics), utilizing the musicians bodies and voices as well as things found only within the building (bottles of water, film reels, Co2 canisters, toilets, etc.) . No "traditional" instruments were used." ("Africans Can Bang A Can Or Two")

Abstract Habitat: Quirky semi-noisy electro-pop; almost danceable ("Anything You Want to I'll Let Ya", "Himane Waltz" - not a waltz, but rather Afro/exotic)Eyeball Music: A tribute to the Residents ("Tribal Teddy," an original, and a cover of "Constantinople")

Zanhour: (the self-explanatory "Midimalism," the twisted robot voices of "Pepe Pull-o" sounds like HAL-9000 after someone dumped a bucket of water over him)

UPDATE 3/30/11: Got a note from the man hisself, who tells us that he's from California, hasn't played live much; is planning new projects thanks to the attention this post has given his music (yay for me!), and sent along a suitably strange list of Fun-to-Know Facts:

> I have a set of Egyptian mummy teeth in a jar.> Elton John, Paul McCartney and I have all played music on the same Harpsichord.> I cry every time I listen to Beethoven's 9th Symphony.> My fingers are all slightly crooked.> I love The Three Stooges as well as the Fleischer's Popeye cartoons.> Tribal Teddy is not an original composition, but a cover of The Residents Teddy from Prelude to the Teds.> I have an accidental collection of clown paintings.> Harlan Ellison once accused me of stealing books from a library (a false accusation I might add).> I have performed exactly one stage-magic show in my life.> I was asked to and did briefly perform on the legendary upright piano on Main Street U.S.A. at Disneyland.So there ya go. (I also had an interesting run-in with Harlan Ellison, by the way; but that's another story.)